📋 Tender Overview
Walmart Quest Diagnostics and DroneUp announced a pilot program to provide drone delivery of COVID-19 at-home self-collection kits to single-family homes in the Cheektowaga-area. The pilot in Cheektowaga is the second drone delivery COVID-19 self-collection kit launch since first piloted in North Las Vegas earlier in September. Drone deliveries will launch from the Cheektowaga Walmart located at 2500 Walden Avenue to single-family homes within a 1-mile radius of the store. Learnings from this pilot will help determine what roles drones can play in pandemic response health care delivery and retail.The drone delivery pilot will be available while supplies last every day from 830 a.m. to 330 p.m. weather and visibility permitting. Once delivered patients will perform a self-administered nasal swab in the privacy of their home. Patients will ship the sample to a Quest Diagnostics lab using a provided pre-paid shipping envelope for processing at the lab and will receive their COVID-19 test results through the secure Quest Diagnostics MyQuest online portal or app.Walmart has been serving the Cheektowaga community throughout the pandemic with drive-thru testing sites and we wanted to provide another way to access testing that provides convenience and leverages technology while learning how drones could impact the delivery of healthcare in the future said Amanda Jenkins Vice President of Operation Support and Implementation Walmart U.S. Health and Wellness. We are grateful to our Quest and DroneUp partners and our pharmacists and associates for their support in launching the pilot as we continue to work together during the pandemic.The kit includes a device for anterior nares nasal swab collection which is the same kit Quest recently made available through its consumer-initiated testing site QuestDirect where consumers can conveniently purchase a COVID-19 Active Infection Test. The specimen is then forwarded to a Quest Diagnostics laboratory for testing. Test results are available in an easy-to-read report on MyQuest the companys secure patient portal accessible on a smartphone tablet or desktop.Quest Diagnostics is proud to partner with Walmart and DroneUp on this innovative pilot program to examine how drones could deliver health care to patients who are unable to leave their home or live in remote locations said Dan Haemmerle General Manager of Extended Care at Quest Diagnostics. We will take the learnings from this pilot and enhance the ways we deliver health care services to the patients we serve.Collaborating to deliver self-collection kits offers further investment into solutions that will advance safe and effective drone delivery said Tom Walker Founder CEO of DroneUp. We are honored to partner with Walmart and Quest to pioneer these deliveries and equally as proud to serve our communities.
